234 Bartáomiej Plichta and Brad Rakerd
4.6 Target words in sentence carriers: The sociophonetic test
For the sociophonetic test, the target words were embedded in sentence car-
riers produced by Talker LM and by Talker UP. Both talkers recorded the
same set of four semantically neutral sentences. The recordings were made
in a quiet place with a close-talking, À at-response microphone (Sennheiser
HMD25–1) and a digital audiotape recorder (Tascam DA-P1). Each sentence
contained a broad sampling of vowels, to include speci¿ c exemplars of /a/ and
/æ/. At the end of each sentence, the talker produced the syllable “uh” in order
to complete the sentence prosodically, and as a “¿ ller” to be digitally replaced
by the synthetic word stimuli. The recorded sentences were as follows:
- Bob was positive that he heard his wife, Shannon, say “uh.”
- Cathy’s card was blue and said: “pot”, while Mary’s was black and
said: “uh.” - The key to winning the game of boggle is to know lots of short words
like “uh.” - It turned out that the most common response to question thirty-two on
last week’s test was: “uh.”
The ¿ nalized stimulus set was created by pairing Talker LM’s four car-
rier sentences and Talker UP’s four sentences with every /hVt/ and /sVk/ tar-
get word item, in the manner shown in Figure 9.7. The syllable “uh” at the end
of the sentence was digitally replaced with the target word items.
4.7 Testing
On sentence-carrier test trials, a single sentence stimulus (selected at random
from the full set available) was presented. The listener’s task was to attend care-
fully to the vowel heard in the last word of the sentence and to report (by means
of a touchpad response) whether it sounded more like “hat” or “hot” (or “sack” or
“sock”). There were a total of 112 test stimuli for the sentence-carrier test (2 talk-
ers x 4 sentences x 2 syllable frames x 7 vowel steps). Each of these was judged
four times over the course of the test, for a total of 448 trials. The randomized
Figure 9.7 Sentence-carrier stimulus design. A sentence produced by Talker UP or
LM was digitally joined to an /hVt/or /sVk/ target word.